Nickel Boys is narrated by Elwood Curtis living in New York City in the present time, looking back at a period of time when he attended the Nickel Academy (a reform school in Florida) when he was a teenager.\u00a0\u00a0 Colson Whitehead tells the story at various points in Ellwood’s life and it isn’t until the end of the story that we find out that there are really two narrators and two lives told in this narrative.\u00a0\u00a0 The storytelling is skillfully shifted to different times, different places, and different points of view, all to paint a larger portrait of systemic racism, societal power structures, suppression, greed, and white-blindness to abuses in the American justice system.<\/p>\n
The story is told in a quiet, understated narrative by a character we can relate to and fear for.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The author winds the events and the background of the place from a true account of a similar institution,\u00a0 the Dozier School in Florida, with documented corruption and abuse of young boys.\u00a0 The story could just as easily have been about the Residential Schools in Canada, with as many unmarked graves in the property behind the school.<\/p>\n
In a way, this is also a horror story, a tale of a naive and diligent young man who thinks he can expose the wrongs of the system, but finds instead the powers of the institution to suppress, punish, and silence those who would reveal the truth.\u00a0\u00a0 Elwood’s friend Turner has a more realistic view and we benefit from his thoughts from his time at Nickel Academy, but also in the decades that follow.<\/p>\n
Colson Whitehead adds some subtle irony in the final chapters as Turner follows up on the investigation into the school, again, inserted without fanfare. \u00a0\u00a0 The writing of this book was done with great skill and vision, one that leaves a long-lasting impression on my own journey to understand the lives of others in our collective history. \u00a0 It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction,\u00a0 deservedly so.<\/p>\n
My rating – 4.9\/5<\/p>\n